Walk a Straight Line (and Follow It)

David Khang is a visual, performance, and biological artist whose practice is informed by education in psychology, theology, dentistry, and law. Khang selectively imbeds these disciplinary codes into his work, to compose interdisciplinary languages that materialize in visual, textual, and spoken forms. In performing, Khang often embodies these languages to interrogate social constructions - of gender, race, and interspecies relations - that are present within dominant historic narratives in contemporary culture. By strategically employing non-native languages and code switching, Khang produces divergent, dissonant, and often hyperbolic and humorous readings that re-imagine the poetic and the political.

In this performance, Khang walked 80 kilometers, or 50 miles, along the Pacific Coast Highway in California--from Irvine to Los Angeles. The performance took 22 hours to complete, traversing a distance that is approximately a one-hour drive. Set against the normative Southern Californian architecture defined by freeways and vehicles, this act of walking, at once absurd and impractical, becomes a conscious gesture that works to reclaim and reinscribe this space with a real body-in-motion. The performance concluded as Khang reached Los Angeles in time for the opening reception at Track 16 Gallery in nearby Santa Monica.